Tarr (Oxford World's Classics) (8 page)

‘A pessimist. I’m a new sort of pessimist. I think I’m the sort that will go down.’

‘Why not? But you must—.’

‘No! I am the panurgic
*
-pessimist, drunken with the laughing-gas of the Abyss: I gaze upon squalor and idiocy, and the more I see them the more I like them. Flaubert built up his
Bouvard et Pécuchet
*
with maniacal and tireless hands, it took him ten years: that was a long draught of stodgy laughter from the gases that rise from the dung-heap.’

‘Flaubert—.’

‘No’ (Tarr raised his flat hand, threatening Hobson’s mouth) ‘he had an appetite like an elephant for this form of mirth, but he grumbled and sighed over his food. I take the stuff up in my arms and bury my face in it!’

As Tarr’s temperament spread its wings, whirling him with menace and mockery above Hobson’s head, the cantab philosopher did not consider it necessary to reply. He was not winged himself. Tarr looped the loop and he looked on. A droll bird! He wondered, as he watched him, if he was a
sound
bird. People believed in him: his exhibition flights attracted attention. What sort of prizes could he expect to win by these a little too professional talents? Would this notable
ambitieux
be satisfied?

The childish sport proceeded, with serious interludes.

‘I bury my face in it!’—(He buried his face in it!)—‘I laugh hoarsely through its thickness choking and spitting, choking and spitting. (He choked and spat.) That is my daily ooze: as far as sex is concerned I took to it like a duck to water. Sex, Hobson, is a german
study: a german study.’ He shook his head in a dejected drunken manner, protruding his lips. He seemed to find analogies for his
repeating
habits in pictures provided by the human digestion.

‘All the same you must take my word for a good deal at this point. The choice of a wife is not practical in the way that, oh, buying a bicycle—think rather of the dishes of the table. Rembrandt paints decrepit old Jews.
*
Shakespeare deals in tubs of grease—Falstaff,
*
Christ in sinners. As to sex—Socrates married a shrew,
*
most wise men marry fools, picture post cards,
*
cows, or strumpets.’

‘That’s all right, but it’s not true.’ Hobson resurrected himself dutifully. ‘The more sensible people I can think of off-hand have more sensible and on the whole prettier wives than other people.’

‘Prettier wives?—You are describing a meaningless average like yourself and their wives. The most suspicious fact about any man with pretensions to intelligence is the possession of an intelligent wife. No, you might just as well say in answer to my art-statement that Tadema
*
did not paint decayed meat, Rembrandt’s octogenarian burghers.’

Hobson surged up a little in his chair and collapsed.—He had to appeal to his body to sustain the argument.

‘Neither did Raphael
*
—I don’t see why you should drag Rembrandt in. Rembrandt—.’

‘You’re going to sniff at Rembrandt! You accuse me of truckling to the fashion in my support of cubism.
*
You’re much more fashionable than I am, if we can be compared without absurdity. Would you mind my “dragging in” cheese, high game—?’

Hobson allowed cheeses with a rather drawn expression: but he did not see what that had to do with it, either.

‘It is not purely a question of appetite’ he said.

‘Sex, sir, is
purely
a question of appetite!’ Tarr exclaimed.

Hobson inclined himself mincingly, with a sweet chuckle.

‘If it is
pure
sex, that is’ Tarr added.

‘Oh, if it is
pure
sex—that naturally—.’ Hobson convulsed himself and crowed thrice.

‘Listen Hobson!—you must not make that noise. It’s very clever of you to be able to: but you will not succeed in rattling me by making me feel I am addressing a rooster.’

Hobson let himself go in whoops and caws, as though Tarr had been pressing him to perform.

When he had finished Tarr enquired coldly:

‘Are you willing to
consider sex seriously or not?’

‘Yes I don’t mind.’—Hobson settled down, his face flushed from his late display.—‘But I shall begin to believe before very long that your intentions are honourable as regards the fair Fräulein.—What exactly is your discourse intended to prove?’

‘
Not
the desirability of the marriage tie, if that’s what you mean, any more than a propaganda for representation and anecdote in art: but
if
a man marries or a great painter represents (and the claims and seductions of life are very urgent) he will not be governed in his choice by the same laws that regulate the life of an efficient citizen or the standards of a eugenist.’
*

‘I should have said that the considerations that precede a proposition of marriage had many analogies with the eugenist’s outlook, the good citizen’s—.’

‘Was Napoleon successful in life or did he ruin himself and end his days in miserable captivity?
*
—
Passion
precludes the idea of success: worldly failure is its condition.—Art and sex—the real thing—we’re talking at cross-purposes—make tragedies and
not
advertisements for health-experts or happy endings for the Public, or social panaceas.’

‘Alas that is true.’

‘Well then, well then, Alan Hobson—you scarecrow of an advanced fool-farm—.’

‘What is that?’

‘You voice-culture practitioner—.’
*

‘I? My voice—? But that’s absurd! If my speech—.’

Hobson was up in arms about his voice: although it was not his.

Tarr needed a grimacing tumultuous mask for the face he had to cover. He had compared his clowning with Hobson’s pierrotesque
*
variety: but Hobson, he considered, was a crowd. You could not say he was an individual, he was in fact a set. He sat there, a cultivated audience, with the aplomb and absence of self-consciousness of numbers, of the herd—of those who know they are not alone.—Tarr was shy and the reverse by turns; he was alone.

A distinguished absence of personality was Hobson’s most personal characteristic. Upon this impersonality, of crowd origin, Tarr gazed with the scorn of the autocrat.

‘As I said we’re talking at cross-purposes, Hobson: you believe I am contending that affection for a dolt, like my fiancée, is in some
way a merit; I don’t mean that at all. Also I do not mean that sex is my tragedy, but only art.’

‘I thought we were talking about sex?’

‘No. Let me explain. Why am I associated sexually with that irritating nullity? First of all, I am an artist. With most people, who are not artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex if it goes anywhere: during their courtship they become third-rate poets, all their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is
the Artist
himself. That is a new sort of person; the creative man.’

‘All artists are not creative.’

‘All right, call yourself an artist if you like. For me the artist is creative. Now for a bang-up first-rate poet nothing short of a queen or a chimera
*
is adequate, the praising-power he’s been born with exacts perfection. So on all through his gifts: one by one his powers are turned away from the usual object of a man’s personal poetry or passion and so removed from the immediate world. One solitary thing is left facing any woman with whom he has commerce, that is his sex, a lonely phallus.’

‘Your creative man sounds rather alarming. I don’t believe in him.’

‘Some artists are less complete than others: more or less remains to the man.’

‘I’m glad some have more than the bare phallus of them.’

‘But the character of the artist’s creation comes in. What tendency has my work as an artist, for I am one of your beastly
creative
persons you will readily allow. You may have noticed that an invariable severity distinguishes it. Apart from its being good or bad, its character is ascetic rather than sensuous, and it is divorced from immediate life. There is no slop of sex in
that
. But there is no severity left over for the work of the cruder senses either. Very often with an artist whose work is very sensuous or human, his sex instinct, if it is active, will be more discriminating than with a man more fastidious and discriminating than he in his work. To sum up this part of my disclosure: no one could have a coarser, more foolish, slovenly taste than I have in women. It is not even sluttish and abject, of the Turner type (the landscape-artist) with his washerwoman
at Gravesend.
*
It is bourgeois, and it is pretty, a cross between the Musical Comedy stage and the dream of the Eighteenth-Century gallant.’
*

At Eighteenth-Century Hobson moved resentfully.

‘What’s the Eighteenth-Century got to do with it?’

‘All the delicate psychology another man naturally seeks in a woman, the curiosity of form, windows on other lives, love and passion, I seek in my work and not elsewhere.—Form would perhaps be thickened by child-bearing; it would perhaps be damaged by harlotry. Why should sex still be active? That is an organic matter that has nothing to do with the general energies of the mind.’

Hobson yawned with sullen relish.

‘I see I am boring you—the matter is too remote. But you have trespassed here, and you must listen. I cannot let you off before you have heard, and shown that you understand. If you do not sit and listen, I will write it all to you in a letter. Y
OU WILL BE MADE TO HEAR IT
!—And
after
I have told you this, I will tell you why I am talking to an idiot like you!’

‘You ask me to be polite—.’

‘I don’t mind how impolite you are provided you listen.’

‘Well I am listening—I have even betrayed interest.’

Tarr as he saw it was tearing at the blankets swaddling this spirit in its inner snobberies. At all events here was a bitter feast piping hot and going begging, it seemed, and a mouth must be found for it: this jaded palate had to serve under the circumstances and it had, its malicious appetite satisfied, to be taught to do justice to the fare.—He had something to
say
; it must be said while it was living: once it was said, it could look after itself.—As to Hobson, he had shocked something that was ready to burst out: he must help it out: Hobson must pay as well for the intimacy.
He must pay Bertha Lunken afterwards
. Tarr at this point felt like insisting that he should come round and apologize to her.

‘A man only goes and importunes the world with a confession when his self will not listen to him or recognize his shortcomings. The function of a friend is to be a substitute for this defective self, to be the World and the Real without the disastrous consequences of reality.—Yet punishment is one of his chief offices. The friend enlarges also substantially the boundaries of our solitude.’

*

This statement was to be found in Tarr’s diary. The self he had rebuked in this way for not listening was now again suffering rebuke by his act of confession with the first-met, a man he did not regard as a friend even. Had a friend been there he could have interceded for his ego.
*

‘You have followed so far?’

Tarr looked with slow disdainful suspicion at Hobson’s face staring at the ground.

‘You have understood the nature of my secret? Half of myself I have to hide. I am bitterly ashamed of a slovenly common portion of my life that has been isolated and repudiated by the energies of which I am so proud. I am
ashamed
of the number of Germans I know, as you put it. In that rôle I have to cower and slink away even from an old fruit-tin
*
like you. It is idle to protect that section of my life, it’s no good sticking up for it, it’s not worth it. It is not even up to
your
standards. I have, therefore, to deliver it up to your eyes and the eyes of the likes of you, in the end—if you will deign to use them! I even have to beg you to use your eyes; to hold you by the sleeve and crave a glance for an object belonging to me!’

‘You’ve succeeded in making me sorry I ever mentioned your precious fiancée!’

‘In this compartment of my life
I have not a vestige of passion
. That is the root reason for its meanness and absurdity. The closest friend of my Dr. Jekyll would not recognize my Mr. Hyde,
*
and vice versa: the rudimentary self I am giving you a glimpse of is more starved and stupid than any other man’s: or to put it more pathetically, I am of that company who are reduced to looking to Socrates for a consoling lead.—But consider all the
collages
*
marriages and affairs that you know, in which some frowsy or foolish or some doll-like or loglike bitch accompanies everywhere the form of an otherwise sensible man: a dumbfounding disgusting and septic ghost! Oh Sex! oh Montreal!
*
How foul and wrong this haunting of women is!—they are everywhere—confusing, blurring, libelling, with their half-baked gushing tawdry presences! It is like a slop and spawn of children and the bawling machinery of the inside of life, always and all over our palaces. The floodgates of their reservoirs of illusion, that is cheap and vast, burst, and sex hurtles in between friendships or stagnates complacently around a softened mind.—I might almost take some
credit to myself for at least having the grace to keep this bear-garden
*
in the background.’